Frail (16 page)

“What’s your name, anyway?” I demanded. Stephen. I didn’t want to see him again, it was embarrassing thinking what he’d look like after trying to stand up to Billy while I just sat there, like Phoebe, doing nothing to help. Up close every part of Seal Girl was in constant movement, eyes blinking and fingers twitching and body shifting from foot to foot like she needed to run to the latrines. Maybe she did.

“Natalie,” she said, and as I caught her eye she ducked her head and her soft-shoeing doubled. “I’m on gofer duty, I have to leave.”

“Where’s Lisa?” I grabbed her arm.

“I don’t know, out hunting with them or . . . why do I care? I’m not her slavey. I don’t want to know.”

She yanked free and ran, skittering into the bushes just like last night, before I could ask about Naomi. Kitchen duty. One of the best jobs, the most prestigious, all that food in easy reach—why in God’s name would Billy want me there, after last night? This couldn’t be right. Maybe it was all some horrible trick. Steeling myself, I walked down to Illinois, pushed open the dining hall door and went inside.

The front room was dim, just a few standing flashlights, remains of yesterday’s fight still all over the floor. The kitchen smelled of old grease and was crammed with canned goods, boxes of instant cereal and potatoes and rice, cartons of pop and bottled water, an aboveground safe house with an apple green wooden table in the corner. Stephen was sitting at it, with a notebook and pen and a pile of soft, sprouted onions, hacking at the tops and wrinkled skins with a knife. I cleared my throat. He kept on slicing.

“So where do we cook, exactly?” I asked. The stove was piled with boxes and cans nearly to the ceiling, but then it was dead anyway. Electric dials.

“Didn’t you see the grills, out in the backyard?” He didn’t look up. “We have a decent supply of briquettes and propane. There’s a couple more houses with wood ovens, the foraging team dragged back a bunch of camp stoves—the ‘kitchen’s’ out back and all up and down the street, this is just the dining hall.”

He put the onion down and gazed at me. In the beam of the big screwtop lantern on the table he had a lot of short dark hair and a washed-out face, homely in that mismatched way where nose, cheekbones, chin were like the wrong jigsaw pieces forcibly pressed together. One cheek was a faint purple, swollen so your fingertips twitched at how painfully tender the skin would feel, but nothing as awful as I’d imagined. His eyes were big and dark and impenetrable, so much like Natalie’s I wondered if they were brother and sister.

“Pity we’re not closer beachside,” he said, motioning for me to sit down. The chairs were hard, straightbacked, the same austere pale green. “The really rich parts of Prairie Beach, those houses some of the lab types had right on the shore? Backup off-grid stoves, gas-powered generators, unbelievable safe houses—”

“Lab types get everything,” I said. My mother used to complain about that, over and over again. Security people were all bitter, they got the actual work of dealing with zombies on the ground but maybe a tenth of the scientist perks. “Even now.”

“I wouldn’t say that.” Stephen handed me a knife of my own, a soft slumping oversprouted onion. “Those gas generators, those safe houses? You have to be alive to enjoy them and the plague ripped through here like a forest fire. Half of Prairie Beach dead or dying in the first two weeks. Well, it would’ve, wouldn’t it?” His face, hunched over the onion, looked grim. “I mean, everyone says they created it, the labs, one of their experiments—”

“Nobody knows where it came from,” I said. The
labs
that spent all their time on “pest eradication”—you weren’t supposed to know that, but everyone heard stories—they created a disease to make zombies stronger? Invulnerable? That was the craziest idea yet, that one. “The labs, the Saudis, the Chinese, illegal immigrants, bioterrorists, I’ve heard all that too but nobody knows where it really came from—”

“I do.”

I put down the knife—so sharp I had to watch my sore fingers—and stared at him. I was sick of all that, rants and fulminations about What Really Happened. Bad enough, last winter, hearing Dave go on about how it was all Mexican illegals spreading disease—good luck to them or anyone getting past the Rio Grande, who needed a border patrol when that dry heat mummified zombies so they lived for centuries. So you heard. He and Ms. Acosta would scream at each other for hours when he got going about Mexicans:
For shit’s sake, Alicia, I don’t mean you!

“You do,” I said.

“Of course not,” Stephen said. He sliced into the heart of the onion—rotten, just like the skin—grimaced and shoved it aside. “It’s just that everyone here’s got the inside story, and I don’t want to feel left out—whose fault do
you
think it should be? How about Freemasons? I’ve heard Jews but not Freemasons, and you’d think, wouldn’t you? Or the Vatican? Is there a Vatican anymore? Nobody knows how far this has spread, or if it’s just us, or what the hell we’re gonna do but by God, they all know exactly who did it. Help me sort through these.”

He hauled a dirty cloth bag from under the table, spilling over with potatoes. They all looked greenish and squishy, lousy with eyes. “Anyway,” he said, “gangs raided that whole bit of Prairie Beach, after the homeowners died. Used up all the gas running the generators, ate themselves sick in the safe houses, had a grand old time until the irregulars found them—”

“Irregulars?”

“Our overlords.” He nicked the eyes off a slightly less green potato, hand moving neat and fast like he was shuffling cards. “My name for them, they don’t call themselves anything. At least not that I’ve heard. We feed about sixty people on the dinner shift, thirty-two of their kind and the rest are humans. A lot of them kill and eat in the woods instead, but we still have to be on standby. For the ones who like to sit with a knife and fork and pretend, remember the old times.” He glanced up from his pile of potatoes, discolored and collapsed like shriveled, deflated tennis balls. “Or just use it as an excuse to play with people, like Billy does. The rest of the kitchen crew’s out right now hauling water—”

“Why did he want me here, anyway?”

“You’re new and he’s a sadist. Who cares why? You didn’t bust out crying, that’s the big thing.” He shook the bag, a few more salvageable potatoes clattering over the tabletop. “And you didn’t jump in to play superhero and get yourself hurt. Let them do the fighting. That and eating’s all they live for.”

“You mean like
you
just let them fight it out?” I winced, remembering him almost screaming in pain as Don’s foot slammed into his side. An ex on a tear could’ve torn him right open, easy as stomping Bubble Wrap with a stiletto heel. “And didn’t say a word?”

He shrugged. “You heard Billy, the poor bastard actually thinks I know how to cook. So I can risk it. You, though, what can you do for anybody?”

He tossed the empty potato bag on the table and stared at me with eyes gone hard and suspicious, demanding I prove myself.
What can you do for anybody?
A good question. I faltered in the face of it, bent my head back down.

Green potato, yellow potato. Green potato—it was hard to tell in the lamplight, some of them had that translucent golden skin that takes on a natural, copper-roof tinge if you squint. I held them up near the bulb for inspection. Stephen swept the rejects back into the bag, all tumbling and knocking against each other like a lot of kittens set to be drowned.

That’d been a test, before, that talk about how he knew-hejust-knew the labs made the plague. To see if I bit, what bait I offered in turn. Jew-baiting, Mexican-baiting, whatever else. This was another one. I can’t stand it when people do that, play those games. There’s no easier way to get on my bad side.

“Thank you for the fork,” I said. “Thank you so, so much.”

I pitched my words sickly-sweet and sugary like it’d been roses, a ruby ring, and something in me felt better to see him scowl. He tossed another cankered potato in the bag with a dull, soft thunk. “Watch out for Mags,” he said. “She’s smarter than Billy, doesn’t fly off the handle like he does. Makes her more dangerous. Don, you don’t need to worry about him.”

“You’re kidding, right? He kidnapped us right off the highway. And then keeping that Janey like a slave or something—”

Stephen shook his head. “It’s not like that with them, it’s . . . I don’t know. It’s not sex, I don’t think, even though everyone assumes it is. He found her crying by the side of the road. I know something terrible happened to her, before, but I don’t want to know what.” He picked up the potatoes I’d dropped, shoved them into a little pile. “Don brings her presents and doesn’t ask her for much of anything. You saw how Billy likes that, to him it’s like one of us keeping a rack of lamb as a house pet—if you’re waiting for me to shut up just say so, for Christ’s sake, I was trying to help you out.”

“I never said you weren’t.” I picked up a potato covered in scaly gray patches, the skin dirt-dry, but it split and oozed a watery porridge the second my fingers touched it; the nauseating contrast of it made me shiver and I tossed it in the bag, scrubbed my palm on my jeans.

“Don’t run away next time,” he said. “There’s nowhere to run.” He dragged his paring knife over the tabletop, chips of apple paint flaking off the blade, his fingers twitching like they wanted to stab hard at the wood. “There’s nothing. Nowhere, and nobody, and nothing left.”

His teeth were clenched and he kept staring down at the short little blade like he dreamed it was last night’s carving knife, the table Billy’s flesh, like he could plunge it in and steal away blood and bubbling life and maybe that would give him somewhere to go, let him salvage something from all this. No chance. Nowhere. Not for anyone. His forehead furrowed beneath the tangled clumps of dark hair and I thought, looking at him, how sorrow is the twin face of rage.

“Thank you for the note,” I said. No sugar, this time. Because I really had been thankful. “I wasn’t sure who sent it, just it probably wasn’t Janey.”

The furrows eased, for a moment, his whole face striving toward good humor. “Be nice to Janey, and Don’ll leave you be. They hate each other.” He swept nicked potato eyes into the discard bag, using the side of his hand like a scraper. “Don and Billy, I mean. But not just them—the ones who were human, before, hate the ones who were undead. The ones who hate humans, who want to use us for what they can get, they hate the likes of Don and Lisa, as traitors . . . so, you know, it’s like it’s always been, since forever. It’s National Brotherhood Week around here every week, and everyone’s got an agenda.”

Just like Phoebe said. This wasn’t like talking to her, though, how she kept trying to decide if I were whole, firm and clean to bite into, or rotten all inside; Stephen’s face was calm like he had no suspicions of me, no expectations, as if he expected nothing—
what are you good for, anyway?
—but that meant I owed him nothing. I was a free agent, here in this kitchen, nobody’s and nothing and going nowhere, exactly like everyone else. Exactly like him. Just the thought of that, the quiet relief of telling no lies because finally someone didn’t care to ask me any questions, despite his tense eye-lopping hands and sullen face it made me start relaxing, a little bit, for the first time since Don hustled us into his car.

“Exes,” I said. “That’s what I call them.” I pushed the rotten onion bits into the bag. “The ones who changed, I mean.”

He thought that over and then, to my surprise, he smiled. It didn’t magically transform him to handsome but it did give his plain piecemeal face a split-second, illusory semblance of harmony; his eyes, animated and intelligent, leapt up right along with his mouth. Gone, that little moment, as swiftly as it came. “Short and to the point,” he said. “I like it. We’re all pretty ex, though, these days. No idea what we are.”

“I still know what I am,” I said. My voice was sharper than I’d meant it to be. “Maybe other humans started acting different, but I haven’t. I got through things, I got through the winter without—”

To say a lie aloud is to confirm it. To be complicit. No. My tongue felt dry and thick, refusing to be party to any of that; how I acted, let’s never talk about how I acted. Ever. I was scrutinizing every little scratch and paint bubble in the tabletop, then I couldn’t stand it anymore and raised my head, looked into his eyes. None of Phoebe’s devouring curiosity, there; instead a flicker of something quick and unquantifiable, as if I were looking into a window and saw a hand twitching at a heavy curtain, exposing just the faintest, swiftest glimpse of what lay inside. Pale silvery wedge of wallpaper, flash of bright blue from flowers in a vase, a sliver of a hesitant, hidden face already retreating from view. A room I knew, from somewhere. A face I knew, someone I remembered arranging those flowers. Then, quicker than his smile, it vanished.

“Our assignment,” he said, “is dinner for sixty. Every human gets rationed so many calories based on male, female, old, young, type of work crew—” He reached for the spiral-bound notebook, flipped it open. “Sometimes the exes bring us extra meat to cook, like last night, that makes it easier. You can help me plan the cooking for the week. I hope you’re good at arithmetic. Assume the average ex eats about quadruple their human equivalent, when you add it up. Bottomless pits, all of them. Assume if there’s any left for us, ever, that we’re lucky.”

His voice was quiet and steady in its bitterness, a thread unwinding at its leisure from the spool, and despite it all it felt like just another day, just another thing, nobody here wanting anything of me but work. That suited me. His face wasn’t so ugly, actually, close up. Some of that had just been the distortion of flashlight shadows.

“Those lights,” I said, nodding toward the industrial lamp. “They must take a lot of batteries.”

“We’ve got more of those than we know what to do with.” He pulled the bag’s drawstring shut. “Batteries, I mean. And cheap plastic flashlights, and lighters. Every safe house, every gas station, every convenience store—”